Iconic Portland beer bar and bottle shop The Beermongers is celebrating their milestone 15th Anniversary this week

When Sean Campbell and Craig Gulla opened The Beermongers in 2009, there were no grand ambitions and little buzz for a tiny bottle shop on a quiet corner of inner southeast Portland next to the train tracks. There was the well established Horse Brass Pub and Belmont Station to aspire to, but beer bars and bottleshops weren’t really a thing yet. The “microbrew” community was extremely niche, but was about to turn a corner into more mainstream relevance just a few years later with places like The Beermongers helping lay the beer stained road to “beervana.”

This year marks The Beermongers 15th anniversary, and it’s been 11 years since co-founder Craig Gulla left the business. “I do think about that every anniversary,” admits Campbell. “Craig and I worked at McMenamins together for years, and we wanted to do something together but didn’t think we could afford to open a brewery.”

Portland had a handful of brewpubs and import beers were popular, so Campbell and Gulla decided what was needed was really a bottle shop devoted to the beers that they really found interesting. Something that could fill an underserved niche between Belmont Station on the outer east and Johns Marketplace on the westside. “We weren’t even going to put a bar in. We only got taps so we could pour samples. We didn’t even know if the OLCC would allow us to have draft beer, and they weren’t really sure and had to get back to us, but said yes when we told them we would be 21+”

Photos from the opening day of The Beermongers, courtesy of Bill Night

The Beermongers opened with two rows of coolers and a lot of bottles, with their buddy’s kegerator in the corner to pour a single draft keg of Ninkasi Brewing’s Total Domination IPA.

“I didnt even really think it would be a bar, I just thought it would be a store with beer to-go. But pretty quickly we realized that the two went hand in hand, and that really made it more of a business,” says Campbell. It was a few months later when they decided to actually put in a draft system. They knew Dean Pottle from the homebrewing community, Dean was a plumber, and famous for his NE Portland basement speakeasy bar and homebrewery ‘Dean’s Scene.’ Pottle, along with his buddy Christoper, did the plumbing and built The Beermongers bar while the business remained open, customers stepping over a pile of dirt and a whole in the ground. When it was finished, they still didn’t have bar stools and would sit around in camping chairs.

The Beermongers started off with 4 draft beers, still thinking they would mostly be a bottle shop. In the first couple years it was just Gulla and Campbell manning the bottleshop and the taps which quickly increased to 8 drafts. The pair decided they would stay open 7-days a week and never take a day off, even on holidays or when the weather got bad. “Part of the reason we have been open every day, is that it created this spot for us to hang out. We didn’t have a lot of family here, and not everyone celebrates every holiday or has their own family here, so we decided to just stay open,” recalls Campbell. “Those were some of my favorite parts, where I fell in love with this other community of people I met through Beermongers where we would like have pop-ups on those holidays. It was a cool place to hang out with a nice group of people. We have been lucky with craft beer that it brings a group of people together that I like.”

Community Events

In those early days they may only make $14 on a Monday, but they had no employees and it didn’t cost them anything to stay open. On those slow days when they didn’t have a smart phone or a TV to occupy them, they started dreaming up some of their most beloved and long-running traditions that remain popular today.

One of of their first events was the ‘Pigs in a Blanket’ customer cooking contest. Gulla and Campbell came up with the idea after looking at a calendar and noticing there was an official day designated for the classic bit of Americana party food made up of sausages or hot dogs wrapped in a blanket of pastry or biscuit dough and baked. “It was a good way to get people together, and also to feed myself, it’s a little self-serving in that way. I don’t particularly have any love for pigs in a blanket,” laughs Campbell.

Other events followed, like the weekly bottle share, Cribbage nights, and the annual smokey & dank fest where Campbell likes to indulge in his love of 420. One of the most popular is the annual, sometimes biannual, Orval celebration, which Beermongers has been hosting since their first or second year, long before importer Merchant Du Vin created an official Orval Day. Gulla introduced Campbell to legendary Belgian Brett beer ‘Orval’ back in their McMenamins days in the late 90’s. That’s when they started saving bottles of it to age for future consumption. Campbell remembers one year when a brand ambassador from Orval came to town, and they followed him from bottle shop to bottle shop; “I think he was a little concerned we were stalking him, which we definitely were. I told him that I had stored some in my garage at warm temperature all summer just to see what it would do. He was kind of horrified and a bit angry.”

It wasn’t until a few years later that The Beermongers started to feel like an actual career to Campbell. It was when they got their first employee, Josh Grgas, and then Sam Pecoraro, both of whom would go on to help brew and run The Commons Brewery. It started to really feel real to Campbell when they hired Jim Bonomo joined as their first beer buyer, that helped put the shop on the map as a real craft beer destination. It suddenly felt like something they needed to start taking more seriously.

The vibe of The Beermongers has always been of a casual hang-out session, the adult equivalent of your mom’s basement game room. That could be used as an insult, but for the Mongers’ it has been both a calling card and a badge of honor. Old beer coolers, hand-drawn customer illustrations and framed photos, stickers, baseball caps, mascots, and mementos from bottle caps to vintage beer festival swag, cover the tables and walls in a scattershot fashion that would give Marie Kondo an aneurysm. Campbell shrugs that off, it works for them, “We werent particularly decorators anyway, we have been accused of being some sort of garage of craft beer. And you know it was like our clubhouse for our friends and family.”

Trials & Tribulations

By 2013 The Beermongers was full steam ahead as popular publichouse and bottleshop for erstwhile beer nerds. The margins on draft beer were better then packaged to-go product, and the business began to revolve more around customer service. They even were considering relocating the business across the street into a larger space that years later became Pine State Biscuits. Their original dreams of being a 9-5 type bottle shop had evolved into something much more all consuming. It started to seem like Gulla, always a numbers guy who wanted to remain behind-the-scenes, no longer seemed happy to be there. So Campbell, worked up the confidence to talk to him about it: “I approached him to be like ‘do you want to keep doing Beermongers?’ and he was like ‘no, I kinda don’t.’ So it was very mutual, we parted ways and he went back to brewing. It wasn’t really his thing to be behind the bar.”

Gulla remained a friendly fixture at The Beermongers for years, with stints as a brewer for Sam Bond’s Brewing in Eugene, and Chuckanut Brewing in Washington. He now brews beer in Utah, and seems to be doing well.

Losing one of their leaders, The Beermongers needed to lean more on developing a devoted staff. This wasn’t a problem, as Campbell was almost always able to find people directly from their own customers pool and friend group. This also really helped in maintaining one of the Beermongers biggest claims to fame: having never closed a single day since opening way back in September 2009.

Campbell is not really sure when the idea of maintaining the perfect 365 days a year unbroken streak became such an important tradition. But he knows it helped to have his buddies on the staff who mostly lived nearby because they were already regulars. It’s become an iconic record for The Beermongers to maintain, that even on Christmas or a frozen and icy day when pipes burst, you can still go to the tavern to warm up and enjoy the company. But that dedication to the 7-day work week nearly reached a breaking point during the pandemic, when it became absolutely necessary for staff to stay home that tested positive and safety was always the priority. To this day, he is still surprised that the record remains intact through everything the world has thrown at them.

Beermongers devotees enjoying distanced beers in a snow covered parking lot during the pandemic in October 2021. Photo courtesy of John Foyston.

The pandemic, and really bad landlords, almost killed The Beermongers. The original Beermongers location at the corner of 12th and Division in a small plaza was the perfect location up until the pandemic pushed frustrations over the top. The bottle shop never served food, but had the great fortune of sharing a building with beloved vegan Italian restaurant Portabello, when that closed another restaurant called AVIV went in and also was a great neighbor, but when they closed down because of the pandemic it became clear to Campbell it was no longer going to work. Since they had no outside seating area, Campbell decided to annex a section of the parking lot and put up a tent as a last ditch effort to stay open. The building owners offered no help, no break or assistance to any of the businesses there. Eventually after public pressure, Beermongers were allowed to keep the tent up, atleast for awhile.

When the management demanded that the tent come down, rather than disassembling it they gifted it to their neighbors at APEX by stopping traffic to carry the entire tent, structure and all, across the intersection. By then it was clear that they should start looking for a new location. Within a few years both APEX and The Beermongers would be forced to move from their respective homes due to unsympathetic property owners.

Refresh

After looking everywhere from the SE Belmont house that would become Foreland Beer’s The Study, to the former locations of Teote, and Laurelwood Brewing’s Sellwood pub, Campbell learned that his lease would not be renewed but with some luck he had already identified 2415 SE 11th Ave as a possibility. The new location is just 2 blocks away from the original, but is pushed back off of the street where it receives less visibility and walk-up traffic, but its a larger space with outdoors area and much kinder landlords. Relying again on their regulars, The Beermongers was able to move nearly all of their business by hand, shuffling even the beer coolers down the street on furniture dolly’s instead of vehicles. On their final day in the original location, the regulars picked up their bar stools after last call and carried them over to the new pub that would open for their first day of business the very next morning.

“It was a little silly, there was construction still going on for weeks if not months, and not all the coolers worked, but people put up with it and the support was amazing, there were 20 people a couple days just showing up to help move stuff!,” remembers Campbell.

Relevance

The Beermongers has now been open in their new location for 2 years, even though it feels like it just moved yesterday, the eclectic decor and all of the hallmarks of the original location have made the transition over and make the space feel already lived in and welcoming. And things are still changing however incrementally, like the recent addition of a beer engine for cask beer, and regular 4-day a week sandwiches from Ninth & Fitzwater. The new patio allows them to host everything from pizza bus drive-ups, to burger cook-outs and barbecue. And there is room to grow, with an upstairs suite in their building vacant, Campbell would love to see it become a pool hall or a version of the late Bailey’s Taproom upstairs bar The Upper Lip. Potentially there will even be a little market area with cheese and snacks for beer pairings or to-go. Campbell even harbors a dream to save up-for-sale home of the late Dean Pottle and with it’s basement bar and nano brewery gathering dust. There is one thing at the new location that is still nagging at Campbell that brings back bad memories of the pandemic: “The tent reminds me too much of those times, and I do want to put it as much behind us, things are different now and its ok. Hopefully we can build a structure out there that is a little more permanent and a little more comfortable.”

But despite the negative after effects of the pandemic like the rise of cost of goods and labor, the average beer drinker aging out, and other causes leading to the shrinking craft beer market, things are good for The Beermongers. “I’m pretty happy with how things are. After a turbulent couple years, it’s still a good way to make a living and still a fun thing to do,” says Campbell.

Campbell has watched the trends go from 22oz bottles and 100+ IBU extreme beers, to Beermongers hosting pumpkin beer tap takeovers, and filling the coolers with smoothie beers, and being grateful for the transition into cans and lagers. He is adamant to keep some of the respected classics, from imported Belgian classics to stylistic standard-bearers from Germany and beyond. Like many weary veteran beer nerds, he has began to embrace the rise in quality of non-alcoholic beers, and they even carry some hard seltzer so long as they are “craft” (you wont find any White Claw.)

Thinking back to his time at McMenamins, Campbell remembers a bit of wisdom from the late-great godfather of Oregon publicans Don Younger bestowed upon him: “I am corrupting an old Don Younger quote to me, but he said something like ‘it doesn’t matter what kind of food or drink you have because anyone can get the same things, you have to create a good fuckin’ atmosphere!’ I think he thought I was like a ‘Mcmenamin’ but I just fucking worked there. I don’t know what you can do beyond that really.”

While other beer businesses are still trying to find the secret to success in this trying time for the industry, any regular of The Beermongers can tell you their secret was not the location, or the branding, or the social media, it’s not even the beer selection or the events, it’s the community that has been built, laid like bricks and built to stand the test of time and only getting stronger with age.

Will The Beermongers be around for another 15 years? “Huh! I don’t know about 15, what would that put me at about 67. I don’t know, I hope. I wish I could plan that far in advance, but I don’t really have another plan. There might be another act for me at some point. But yeah, 15 years, I might be ready to retire by then.”

The Beermongers

2415 SE 11th Ave, Portland, OR 97214

15th Anniversary Week Events:

Wednesday September 4th

Cellar Sale, Bottle Share & Ninth & Fitzwater

A Wednesday tradition for years this Bottle Share Wednesday will include some vintage bottles for sale and some vintage draft beers.
Please feel free to bring a bottle to share, one is OK thanks! Make it really old or really awesome.
The BeerMongers regular Hoagie King Ninth & Fitzwater will provide a special menu.

Thursday September 5th

5480th Day Open in Row

Von Ebert Beer Patio, pFriem Grisette Collab Release, HarBQ, Ninth & Fitzwater and Scoops Ice Cream.
Our 15th Anniversary Day will feature some of their favorite foods, people and BEER!

Former BeerMonger Sam Pecoraro and the Von Ebert Team will be hosting a Patio Party with special beer releases.
Long time BeerMonger customer Kyle Krause will be on hand to discuss the new collaboration Grisette we created together. I have known Kyle since at least 2011 and the beer is special to us both. Combining old world techniques and the Funk I Love with NW ingredients.
Harlan, Evan and a team of wizards have been creating BBQ masterpieces for sometime on the Mongers Patio. We are thrilled to have HarBQ here for our Anniversary.
Resident Hoagie Man Brad will be crafting Ninth & Fitzwater sandwiches.
Recent additions to the Mongers family Scoops will be serving handcrafted Ice Cream, possibly with BEER!

Friday September 6th

Anniversary Party Day Two

English Style beers featuring Away Days Mr Ordinary, Briel's BBQ, Ninth & Fitzwater, Scoops and Howdy Slowpoke Tattoos

Beermongers have been thrilled with the popularity of English Style Ales in recent years. After letting dust settle on their cask engine over nearly a decade of non-use, in April they participated in the Away Days Brewing cask passport and it was a huge success. They also collaborated on an Ordinary Bitter with Marshall Kunz at Away Days and will tap the last keg on 9/6 along with a Foreland Cask beer, a Machine House firkin and other fun English style beers.
Friends Briel's BBQ will bring their rig up from Independence Oregon to feed the beer drinkers lovely smoked meats and fresh salads.
Ninth & Fitzwater will be here with inspired sandwiches and special ICE CREAM from their buddies Scoops
As a special treat, friend Lyss will be there late night starting at 6pm to do some Stick & Poke Tattoos.

Saturday September 7th

First Ever Fresh Hop Festival

Little Brother Burger Pop Up and Ninth & Fitzwater

Beermongers have developed a love for Fresh Hop beers and love the variety of flavors the Hop Harvest season brings to the Northwest. They have some special Anniversary Glassware and will have a token system for the Fresh Hop Beer Patio.

Long time friends of the BeerMongers Little Brother Burgers will be here to serve up some fun grab.

Sunday September 8th

Mark & Alek's Terrible Trivia + Demarcos Sandwiches and Dana Carey Pastries

Once a month, usually on a Sunday, these dudes Mark & Alek yell out Trivia questions at their customers. Some people like it, but some people like Kolsch...Come if you want

Definitley come for Dana Carey's Pastries, Demarcos Sandwiches and the beer specials that will wrap up our Anniversary week.